Every Tool I Use For My Amazon Seller Business

My post how to start an Amazon FBA business was a beast. 4,000 words of in-depth step-by-step explanation on how to become a profitable Amazon seller from scratch. But 4,000 words is massive, I wouldn’t be surprised if you got bored after the first paragraph, or decided it just wasn’t for you.

Well to make it easier (and also in response to a bunch of emails) I have compiled in this shorter post every Amazon seller tool I use to run my Amazon FBA businesses. And it’s not just me who uses them. They all originally came recommended from friends of mine who are very profitable Amazon sellers.

Market Research

I recently wrote a whole article about market research for Amazon FBA. In it, I completed raved about my favourite Amazon seller tool: Jungle Scout. It’s seriously awesome and powerful. And the more I use it the more I like it. Jungle Scout lets you very easily dive into Amazon and getting all sort of useful information about your potential competitors and choose where you’ll position your niche. It even includes approximate monthly sales.

The Chrome extension costs $87 one-off and works with the UK and USA marketplaces. Or the Web App (which I use) is $69 a month for the version that includes the Niche Hunter (my favourite tool) or £39 for just the product database. It only works with the USA marketplace.

EDIT: The Web App now works for all marketplaces and not just the USA.

If I’d known about Jungle Scout when I first started it would have saved me from a lot of the rookie Amazon seller mistakes I made.

Sourcing Your Product

I find all my suppliers on Alibaba. The basic website and a lot of the stuff sold on it are pretty awful. But it does give you a very easy way to find and get in touch with a lot of factories in countries where it is very cheap to produce products.

It’s free to contact the suppliers. But they will often charge you to send you samples.

I’ve been able to run a profitable Amazon seller business involving multiple factories building my own unique products. All without ever leaving my bedroom. I have never been to China. I have never even spoken to anyone on the phone. I communicate completely through email or sometimes skype messages. All thanks to Alibaba and the contacts I made through it.

Cheap Foreign Currency Payments

If you do a normal bank transfer or Paypal payment for a large amount of foreign currency you will get burnt with huge exchange fees. To get round them I use CurrencyFair. It’s a marketplace where your currency is exchanged with another user for free. Similar to how the stock market works.

You don’t pay any conversion fees, but there is a small fee for any withdrawals. Currently, it is £2.5.

I normally get the same exchange rate that is being quoted on Google. So the only cost is the withdrawal fee. On a £10,000 transfer, a £2.5 fee is nothing. It would cost closer to £300 to do a regular bank transfer. The only issue with CurrencyFair is that the payments aren’t instant. But for a £300 saving, I think it is well worth it.

Import, Logistics and Customs Clearance

I use Flexport for all my logistics and dealing with customs. All that stuff is a minefield and as I am sending inventory to multiple countries with lots of different laws, it makes sense to outsource it all. Flexport is a Google-backed venture that aims to bring logistics into the web era.

Unfortunately, they are currently only accepting new clients who are doing over 5,000kg of freight a year. So if you are a smaller seller, here are some options you could try instead:

Fedex or DHL– Very easy to use and you can send straight from your supplier to the Amazon FBA warehouses. It is probably the cheapest option for shipments under 100kg.

Warehousing & Fulfilment

I use Amazon FBA for single item fulfilment. Unfortunately, you need to pay Amazon per item in the order. Even if you’re selling hundreds to a single buyer. To get round that huge cost I use Shipwire for any wholesale fulfilment. Provided I’m selling full cartons it works out very cheap.

That being said, I have had some bad experiences with Shipwire. They can be slow and they only work in dollars. Ok, I know they’re not an Amazon seller tool. But if you are building a brand then wholesaling to physical retailers should definitely be in your long-term plan.

Marketing

I’m not great at marketing, but you can read about my experiments with PPC here and the update here.

Getting Reviews

I have found that the number and quality of reviews on your product on Amazon are hugely important for getting sales. But most people don’t leave a review, so if you leave it to build organically it could take hundreds of sales before even getting one. Which means potentially thousands of missed sales before your product looks trustable.

One tactic for getting more reviews that I like to do is to email each customer personally. Unfortunately, Amazon doesn’t let you send out automated emails and if I had to do it manually I’d be typing all day. Luckily there is a third party website known as Feedback Genius that does it for you.

On Feedback Genius, you can set up automated emails that contain. It also ties in with all marketplaces, so I can send my personal friendly emails in different languages depending on what Amazon they purchased from.

My email strategy is pretty simple. I try and sound personal and like we are a small brand (which we are). Then I try and set them up to only leave good reviews: “If you didn’t like the product then email me, otherwise please leave a good review”.

Feedback Genius is only $20 a month for up to 1,000 emails a month. To me, that’s a real no-brainer.

Bookkeeping And Accountancy

I use Xero UK (click here for the USA version) for all my accounting and bookkeeping. It’s not specifically for Amazon sellers, in fact I use it for every one of my businesses, but it does work great with Amazon.

You link up your Amazon seller and bank accounts to it, and Xero reconciles everything and provides you with every report imaginable. I also use it to file my VAT and other tax returns.

Check out this post on how I recently used Xero to run one of my latest companies completely without an accountant. It’s a great tool.

Xero currently costs either £22 or £27.5 a month depending on whether you need multi-currency. I do because I sell in USD, CAD and EUR as well as £.

I use a plugin called A2X to automate the linking of my Amazon seller centrals to Xero. A2X is currently $59 a month for each continent (and there’s a 10% forever discount with code TRYA2X17_10%OFF). I therefore need two subscriptions to cover both the Americas and Europe.

A2X isn’t a necessity. You can do it manually if you want, and you probably should if you’re not making much money. But it’s quite a lot of manual work copying and pasting the information from two invoices a month from each marketplace into Xero, and it’s very easy to make mistakes.

Don’t forget to use code ARBAPR2017 when you sign up for a 10% lifetime discount.

Share this:

Hi Tim! Thank you for sharing all this useful info. I have read pretty much all of your posts relating amazon fba business model and I find them all really useful.
I wonder do you use any service / web app to track social buzz of certain products or product niches? Let’s say I have a product that is trending, but I would like to get an impression on how much of a social buzz does it create. Is there a service for that you would recommend?

Thank you!

Arnold

Hello Sam. Very informative post. Thanks.

I was wondering how do you inspect items which go to the US store?

I mean the very first time, since you are residing in the UK. You order something from Alibaba and how do you know that the things you ordered are up to your standard, if it goes directly to FBA warehouses in the US. I’m talking about private label stuff. Thanks.

Hi both. Sorry I missed the original message. I don’t send it directly to the FBA warehouse but it stops off at my freight forwarders warehouse. The do a quality control check of the stock. It is a bit more expensive but well worth it.

Nial Ahmad

Hi Sam,

As a seller on Amazon UK and if you had to pick just one of these, would you recommend the Jungle Scout chrome extension or web application? Thanks.

Hi Sam, love your blog.
I have nearly completed the process of sourcing my first FBA product but I am just wondering, when paying with CurrencyFair how do you ensure a level of protection on the order in case of any unforeseen problems?

Can you go through Alibaba to rely on their Trade Assurance or do you pay a percentage up front and the balance on arrival? Any advice here would be much appreciated.
Thanks.

I’ve never done a payment through Alibaba, so can’t really comment on their protection stuff. I imagine it might be more expensive, especially for currency conversion. But it could be worth doing anyway, especially for your first order while you’re building a relationship.

Or you can negotiate different payment terms. Say payment on completion or 50% up front, 50% on completion.

Do you have a reason to worry about the payment? Generally my thoughts are that if they are well rated on Alibaba, have been in business a long time, have sent you samples and prototypes and are making all the right noises they are very unlikely to be an outright scam. You might have issues with the quality of the product they make (especially if your item is electronic) but a term stating payment on delivery won’t help with that.

Simon Hartley

No, I don’t really have a specific reason to worry about the payment. It’s more just a case of having not been this process before so I’m being extra cautious as I can’t afford to make any mistakes!

My product is a simple garment type item and I have been impressed with the supplier so far, so I think I will just suggest the 50/50% idea and if that’s a no go, just take the risk with CurrencyFair.

Thanks for your response.

King Lannister

Hi Sam
Recently stumbled across your blog.
Very impressed, i feel much more informed.
I want to start an Amazon FBA business on less than £300, how feasible is this?

£300 isn’t very much. It’s doable, but it will be very hard. You need to find a cheap item you can source without having to pay too much in shipping. And it will take a while to churn your money and build up your pot to a decent size.

Have you looked into retail arbitrage at all (https://sampriestley.com/retail-arbitrage/)? It is a way to get into Amazon FBA cheaply. You can earn money through that until you have £2k+ and then use that profit and Amazon FBA knowhow to start creating your own products.

King Lannister

Thanks Sam
Very much appreciated, you rarely find people so willing to give help.
I will study your site and any success i have, i shall let you know.

costasz

For somebody who is just starting selling products on Amazon, could you please share what the roadmap should be? What sequence of actions he should take? For example, subscribe on joungle scout –> find your product –> go to alibaba etc?

You don’t need to pay for any software until it is worth your while to do so. Well apart form maybe a market research tool, but you only need to get one month of that.

Bookkeeping, follow up emails, and accountancy software is only needed when you are selling so much that you can’t do it by hand. At that point you are making more than enough to cover the cost of the software.

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Hello! My name is Sam Priestley and I would like to welcome you to my blog. I read all comments so any questions don’t hesitate to ask.